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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

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Intuition is perceived to be second sight, clairvoyance, the supposed ability to perceive future or distant events. It is a word tossed about too casually in Silicon Valley, as though we manufacture mediums, not microchips. Entrepreneurial intuition does exist, but it isn't magical. It is driven by the relentless observation of everything. It is how I came to conceive of a product that is now a standard part of the silicon chip-making industry and sell it to Texas Instruments before I ever wrote an engineering specification for it. It also led me to start Micrel because the entrepreneurial drive made me an ill-fitting cog in the machinery of slower-thinking companies.

If you are working in academic research, the field of MEMS development can be very exciting, but it can also be quite stressful. You will spend long hours in the cleanroom and your professor is constantly pushing you to finalize the prototype fabrication in order to start writing scientific publications. You will probably see no sunlight for a while. When developing a new MEMS fabrication process, the first few wafers (or wafer batches) will usually not yield working devices. This is normal -- a PhD thesis would be much shorter otherwise. Depending on the complexity and the novelty of the process, it takes several weeks, months or even years to get a handful of good chips.

Innovative Micro Technology (IMT), the largest pure-play MEMS manufacturer in the United States, announced this week the signing of a partner agreement with Silicon Catalyst, reportedly the world's only startup incubator focused exclusively on semiconductor solutions. The partnership with Silicon Catalyst offers a unique opportunity for IMT to provide MEMS related technical consulting, manufacturing expertise, and prototype development services to the portfolio startup companies that are considering MEMS sensors and solutions.